Were Badges of Justice really that bad of an idea?

IIRC, back in TBC, I would farm Karazhan for badges to obtain new gear for myself, even though I out-geared Karazhan. If they implemented badges back into the game today, wouldn't this allow people to farm older raids with a purpose? Why were badges removed anyway? I honestly wouldn't mind if they came back. It would give us more to do, no?

BoJs are exactly the same as VP/JP really. Which sorta did and sorta didn't work in the way you want it to - in Wrath and Cata you could do old raids to cap but now there's so many other ways to cap not a lot of people do it that way. I still see a fair few old raid runs in openraid though.

Very interested to see what they do in WoD since I don't think there will be any VP/JP anymore.

Although I didn't play during Wrath I really liked the concept of weekly raid quests; perhaps they could implement something similar.

Problem with those quests was that the objective was rarely the last boss of the instance, so if you actually wanted to clear the whole place you were out of luck since half the raid would drop as soon as the quest boss was dead.

BoJs are exactly the same as VP/JP really. Which sorta did and sorta didn't work in the way you want it to - in Wrath and Cata you could do old raids to cap but now there's so many other ways to cap not a lot of people do it that way. I still see a fair few old raid runs in openraid though.

Very interested to see what they do in WoD since I don't think there will be any VP/JP anymore.

Everything you do at max level should give some form of currency to buy something fun imo. Even doing old raids and such, now obviously it should only give a minimal amount so it can't be abused. But if you would be able to buy something fun every month with the points you earned from being active no matter what you did it would be a decent motivation.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Kezzik

doesn't have the same feel as picking up badges off a corpse

It's true in some sense, picking up something feels more rewarding then having it just added up and see it in chat. Same thing but different feeling.

The issue with BoJ and currency in general is that people started viewing instance as chores to be done hence the cries about instances taking all of 30 minutes when some over geared whiny baby would complain that he could solo it in 10. In general, making group content like dungeons chores to be done for a generic reward isn't a good idea.

Heck, look at your example. Once Kara dropped badges it became much harder to get people to do a heroic because people didn't view the content as a way to have fun, they calculated the badges/hour return. The reason they did this is that most people who were ager BoJ didn't need the gear from either Kara or heroics, they wanted the T6-equivalent badge gear, i.e. the system encouraged people to run content not because they wanted to run the content, but because they wanted the currency.

The biggest problem with them was having to run Karazhan for the entire expansion because it was the most efficient way to acquire badges. No person raiding Sunwell should feel obligated to go back three and a half tiers earlier because of some currency, but yet many of us did just that.

In some ways the badge system was nice, but overall I think it was poorly though-out.

(lots of people also hated that people could farm Karazhan and buy Sunwell quality gear too, but that didn't bother me)

The biggest problem with them was having to run Karazhan for the entire expansion because it was the most efficient way to acquire badges. No person raiding Sunwell should feel obligated to go back three and a half tiers earlier because of some currency, but yet many of us did just that.

In some ways the badge system was nice, but overall I think it was poorly though-out.

(lots of people also hated that people could farm Karazhan and buy Sunwell quality gear too, but that didn't bother me)

Being obligated to run obsolete content for current raid progression is bad. If people want to go back for transmog or pets or nostalgia or on alts, great. But no one should feel pressured to spend a portion of their available raid time each week to keep farming a raid instance for years, long after every drop in the place is irrelevant. That's shitty design.

And I didn't say "getting max level epics for easiest content" was good design. It's not. I said I didn't care about it. I don't give a shit whether some random guy's alt has Sunwell quality pants because he farmed Karazhan for twenty weeks in a row; it doesn't hurt me any.

Not even max level epix... TBC item levels were a gigantic mess where you could find three different levels of gear inside one instance. Short version is that the very last and highest level BoJ items were:

- full tier below Sunwell gear
- half tier below Illidan/Archimonde
- less than half tier above the early T6 trashbosses
- added into the game almost year after world first Illidan kill

The BoJ items back then were just like VP gear today meant to patch up for bad luck with drops. Only real difference was that you could buy almost every item slot including weapons with BoJ.

I think they worked well back in TBC, in the current model they're just valor.

Back in BC they didn't provide catch-ups to skip old content, so the ability for someone working through Kara to get the same items as someone progressing through SWP provided a very powerful boost to players and was a neat way of making shit like Karazhan still worth running. Because a group of geared raiders could storm the place and get a shit-ton more badges than if they'd spent that time doing 5 mans. Obviously MSV is similar in that sense, but Karazhan was far more potent at it.

Personally I think it worked very well, it wasn't a fast currency but it was a good pace for TBC. It wouldn't work today with the 'now' mentality that demanded the ability to valor cap in 40 minutes.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Tziva

Being obligated to run obsolete content for current raid progression is bad. If people want to go back for transmog or pets or nostalgia or on alts, great. But no one should feel pressured to spend a portion of their available raid time each week to keep farming a raid instance for years, long after every drop in the place is irrelevant. That's shitty design.

And I didn't say "getting max level epics for easiest content" was good design. It's not. I said I didn't care about it. I don't give a shit whether some random guy's alt has Sunwell quality pants because he farmed Karazhan for twenty weeks in a row; it doesn't hurt me any.

I personally never felt like the Badge system was obligatory. I was a filthy terrible back in TBC so it's highly likely I just wasn't in the right guild; but the nature of BoJs made it very difficult to expect people to have all the loot by x date. With the ease of valor and it's finite amounts I feel that feeds the obligation a lot more than 'here is 1000 Badges worth of gear, and if you want it effectively you better run Kara every week.'

As I said, it may be that I was just in the wrong environment, but the scale of the Badge system to me, made it unreasonable to stamp obligations on it, personally I don't recall people getting called out for not running Karazhan. If it were that big a deal I imagine my pugs would have had far more geared players.